Alice Greene & Company

John Repp is a widely published, and award-winning, poet. Cold-Running Current is his second chapbook with the press.

Lyrical tenderness lies in each poem of Cold-Running Current—a narrative emerging through portraits of family and the natural world. John Repp travels through the persistent memories of his childhood and youth—the mysterious Senators that he needs to write, the best-for-bluegill-bait bread of his uncle’s bakery, his elementary school teacher, Miss Voglin:

• Lovely in a blue dress, cinched waisted, white polka dots.
• Lovely, too, in her snaggletooth, nose wen & all flaws unseen
• by the children careening past & the ones leaning in
• for the low warbling kindness & the cool rain
• of her regard. How was New York, Miss Voglin?

Humor and poignancy coexist: what to do about the 50-year-old trout in a box, and how we realize, as adults, our defining childhoods.

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